Secret Lives (Secret McQueen Book 9)

by Sierra Dean

  For now, I had him circling. I had to hook him on the line.

  I coyly played with one of my curls and looked down, then back up at him through my lashes, that classic flirt move that said, I’m shy, but don’t go anywhere.

  For some reason it was a move super-predatory dudes loved. It seemed to say to them that a willing victim was afoot. I was of the opinion that there was no such thing as a willing victim, but for the time being I needed to play one.

  “What brings you here tonight, Jessica?” His voice was smooth and as cool as marble. It retained a hint of a Slavic accent, though he’d been in America quite some time. I was always intrigued by vampire accents. Some vampires I knew held on to their history that way, while others seemed willing to let it go. Holden, though he’d been born in England, barely had an accent at all anymore.

  He did sometimes drop mate and love into conversations, as if they were perfectly normal things to say.

  Davos was watching my keenly, waiting for my answer. “Just looking to make some friends.”

  “I’m told I make a very good friend,” he replied without missing a beat.

  This guy was good. He was handsome in a way that wasn’t pretty, and might have even been ugly from certain angles. He was rough around the edges, like he’d taken a few too many beatings in his human life, giving his nose a battered, crooked appearance. He had heavily lidded eyes and dark hair gelled back from his face.

  He looked, I realized, as if he was trying to milk that whole Dracula aesthetic. It worked for him.

  He had thin lips curled up in a smirk, and cheekbones so sharp I could have used them to open my mail.

  It was the kind of face that would have been really compelling in a painting. Was he beautiful? Was he grotesque? Somehow he was both at the same time, and it was an intriguing package.

  “A good friend would offer to buy a lady a drink,” I suggested.

  He waved to the bartender without looking at him, and said, “Are we the type of friends who share drinks, Jessica?” His gaze wandered to my exposed neck. “I hope so.”

  I blushed, which wasn’t something I could fake. The naked hunger on his face was enough to render me a bit uncomfortable. Thankfully, the overall effect made me look like a nervous doe being circled by a wolf. The uptick in my pulse probably read as excitement and not a fight-or-flight response gearing up.

  All of it worked in perfect harmony to transform me into a tantalizing little morsel for a hungry vampire.

  Davos handed me my new drink, and I set the empty glass from my first one back on the bar. The vampire offered me his arm, which I took as if he were my undead prom date. He guided me into the gloom, where two big, meaty vamps were standing near an empty table.

  I widened my eyes to feign being impressed, while I tried to get a read on how old and strong these bruisers were if I needed to fight my way out of this.

  When I was part vampire, I could get a read on another vampire’s power with a quick glance. I could feel how old they were in my very bones. That was unfortunately not something I’d retained when I’d given up all my powers. But over the last five years I’d slowly started being able to pick up on things that hinted at a vampire’s capability.

  The oldest and youngest ones were easiest. It was those two-hundred- to four-hundred-year-old ones I still had trouble getting a read on.

  These guys were split. The one with curly brown hair on the right was old. He’d probably been with Davos a long time. The bald one on the left was new, practically a baby. I could tell by the way he let his guard down for a second to watch me walk by. He was hungry, and I was betting Davos let these guys have his scraps. Enthrall a girl and then pass her around to his buddies as a reward for their hard work.

  Gross.

  There still weren’t laws against that sort of thing, but in my minor governmental capacity I had certainly made the suggestion that there should be laws related to the willing sharing of blood. And more specifically the unwilling.

  But the finer points of vampire-human laws were not really relevant at the moment.

  The man whose arm I was holding might very well know what had happened to Sig, and if that was the case, I needed to figure out how to get that information out of him.

  I doubted he’d share what he knew with me if I were to ask politely.

  Guess I might need to force it out of him. I didn’t feel even the slightest bit bad about that prospect.

  Davos guided me to a big leather booth, where he sat down and slung his arms on the backrest, looking as leisurely and cool as if he were a king observing his subjects.

  If this dude thought I was going to kneel, he had another think coming.

  Instead I sat close enough to him that our thighs touched, and I took a sip of my drink, avoiding his gaze like I thought a nice, shy girl should. Pretending to be shy was about as far outside my comfort zone as I’d been in a good long while.

  I was usually more punchy-kicky and less flirty-blushy.

  “Is this your first time here?” he asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.” This was almost the same line the first vampire had given me at the bar, but for some reason it was more effective coming from Davos.

  “My first time,” I replied honestly.

  “I thought so. I would have remembered a face like that.” He stroked my cheek with the back of his hand, and I shuddered, which I hoped he registered as excitement rather than repulsion.

  Were there only a finite number of pick-up lines available in the world? Sometimes it seemed like it, and that the success-to-failure ratio for men depended entirely on how well they wielded the weapons of their craft.

  Davos was skilled.

  I could see women falling at his feet, eager to open a vein for him. He was basically the vampire ideal, the perfect story to go home and share with your girlfriends over a bottle of merlot.

  If you made it home.

  I thought of the two dead girls in the park and suddenly wanted to get his hands off me very, very badly. More than being a potential source of information, this man was a killer, and a historically prolific one at that. When someone was capable of leaving that kind of violence in their wake, they weren’t a person to take lightly.

  Once again I was aware of how human I was and how many women before me Davos had gotten his hands on and killed. I had to be really careful here, because a silver knife in my boot wasn’t going to be much use against him if he decided to snap my neck.

  Vampires were fast. I was not on that level anymore.

  Apparently Davos was done with small talk. Instead, he pressed his body against mine, his nose grazing my exposed throat. When he placed a gentle kiss beneath my earlobe, I stood up suddenly.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” I spit out.

  We’d gone from chatter to canoodling way too quickly, and my head was spinning. A welcome side effect of my time as a vampire was that their thrall didn’t work on me, even as a human, but it was small comfort right now as the shark next to me had smelled potential blood in the water.

  Basically it meant he wouldn’t have the power to make it painless when he bit me. Not the best superpower to have at a time like this.

  “Leaving so soon?” He gave a sad, languid pout and casually touched the seat I’d just been in, as if inviting me back.

  I smiled and held up my little clutch. “I want to freshen up a little. You know.”

  His nostrils flared, and I was so icked out by the idea of whatever he might be sniffing for that I struggled to maintain my composure when all I wanted to do was have a hot shower and scrub off any memory of this interaction.

  “Bruno can show you the way. Bruno, escort the young lady to the washroom.”

  Bruno was the bald guard, the young one who just couldn’t wait to take a bite of me when Davos was done. I wasn’t sure I wanted to have any quality alone time with him. It didn’t escape my attention, either, that Davos wasn’t letting me go to the washroom on my own. He was having me followe
d. He intended to bring me back.

  Evidently he had found what he wanted for the night, and it was me.

  Lucky gal, wasn’t I?

  Bruno grunted his assent to Davos and led me towards the back wall of the bar where two doors were standing side by side. I went into the one with the little skirt-wearing stick figure and immediately shut myself into a stall. I took in a shaky inhale, held it, then let it out in a swift whoosh.

  It had been awhile since I’d been in therapy, and over a year since my last panic attack, but I could feel the cold, creeping hand of one scratching the inside of my chest.

  I put a hand over my heart, and my pulse was running rampant.

  Davos hadn’t threatened me, hadn’t made an aggressive move, and hadn’t done a single damn thing to remind me of Dr. Kesteral, the man who had once ripped open my rib cage and pulled out my still-beating heart to show to me, but something about this scenario, and the surrender of my power even for show…it was setting off all the alarm bells inside me.

  I braced a hand on each wall of the bathroom stall and closed my eyes. One…two…three… I kept counting to ten, taking a measured breath between each number. Not a perfect solution, but one that would dull the edge of what I was feeling.

  I could get through the night.

  Maybe when I got back to L.A. it would be time to call Dr. Woodbine, the psych expert who worked at our office there. Talking to someone who knew the ins and outs of the supernatural community was my only option. When I’d tried to explain to a human therapist that Kesteral had broken my arm just to see how long it would take to heal, they were supportive and gave me PTSD coping techniques.

  It was when I told them what I’d done to him afterwards that they tended to balk.

  I targeted that memory, the recollection of him sitting alone in a chair as I approached with my sword in hand. The moment he realized no one would stop me from killing him was as close to a good memory of Kesteral as I could get.

  I was strong.

  I was a survivor.

  I was going to find Sig.

  Taking one final deep breath, I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was a familiar symbol writ large on the back of the stall door. The odd upside-down seagull.

  A second later someone grabbed me from behind and pulled me through the now-missing bathroom wall.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The hand clasped over my mouth muted my scream, but nothing could keep me from fighting back.

  What the fuck?

  It wasn’t every day I got pulled through the back of a bathroom stall, and while I tried to reconcile myself to the surrealness of being dragged into a dark hole in the wall, I was also trying to break free of my assailant.

  Self-defense 101 taught you that even if someone was holding your arms, you could still slap backwards and get a good shot in at the groin.

  I smacked my attacker hard, and he grunted. I say he even though I couldn’t see, because the grunt was decidedly male, and the arms holding me had been very hairy.

  He didn’t let go of me, but he did release my mouth, which gave me enough of an edge to bite him in the hand. That was when he let go of me.

  The door had closed behind us, and we were in the dark, presumably in a room or passage hidden behind the women’s bathroom stalls, which was creepy as hell and just got creepier the more you thought about it.

  But we were also in a vampire bar, which meant this dude was probably a vampire. My window of time to defend myself was shrinking by the second because he’d recover quickly, and when he did, he would be mad, and an angry vampire wasn’t exactly a fair fight one-on-one.

  I grabbed the knife out of my boot, and when he lunged at me a second time, I had it to his throat before he could get to mine.

  The blade tickling the skin below his jaw gave him pause.

  A thin line of blood traced down his neck.

  My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so now I was able to see that the vampire who’d attacked me had been none other than Bruno the guard.

  “Jesus, you couldn’t even wait until I was out of the stall? I thought your deal was sloppy seconds.”

  He blinked at me, clearly still expecting the timid Jessica ruse I’d favored when trying to win my way in with the vamps. Hook, line, and sinker, only now I was stuck inside a wall with this guy and had no idea how to get out.

  I pressed the blade harder to his throat. “What am I doing in here?”

  “We thought you’d make a good offering,” he said, speaking quietly to keep my knife from digging deeper into his skin. The area around the tip was mottled already as the silver burned him.

  The word offering certainly caught my attention, especially when paired with the symbol I’d seen on the door. And at the crime scenes.

  Then it clicked where I’d seen it before.

  At the ceremony site when they’d opened the gates, that stupid upside-down seagull had been one of the sigils marked on the alley, one of the things that had called Belphegor and the red demon up to the surface.

  These motherfuckers were kidnapping girls and using them as part of a demonic sacrifice.

  Didn’t vampires have anything better to do with their time these days? Was starting the apocalypse really such a big thing right now that it was a bicoastal issue? Fucking demon-loving-vampires everywhere.

  “Do I seem like a good offering to you now?” I asked.

  He started to shake his head but thought better of it as the silver singed him. “No.”

  “Did you take those two girls last month? The ones who were dumped in the park?” I knew the answer, since I’d touched the charcoal dust myself. They’d done the ritual right there and left the girls afterwards.

  It must not have worked so well, what with Hell not being unleashed on the city yet again.

  “Did Davos tell you to do this?”

  He didn’t reply, which was the only answer I needed.

  “Where is Sig?” This was as good a time as any to ask the question, since he seemed willing to talk about some things, and I wasn’t sure how long my little knife would keep him back.

  “Who?”

  Bruno didn’t strike me as a great actor, so I had to guess his response to my question was genuine. Still, it seemed suspect he wouldn’t know Sig’s name. Even a new vampire knew who Sig was, considering how important his rank was in vampire society.

  So this guy was either a liar or an idiot, and I wasn’t sure which one was most likely.

  Maybe both.

  “The Tribunal wants your boss dead, did you know that? Have you seen what happens to little goons like you when their masters get killed? It’s not pleasant, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “What do you know about it?” he snarled.

  “I know I’ll be the one submitting your name for a warrant of your own when I get out of here. And I’ll be the one delivering on Davos’s. Whatever it was he had on Sig to stay the hand of execution, I don’t care. Davos is going to die, and I’m going to do it myself.”

  Bruno chuckled, then stopped abruptly as the knife dug deeper. “You can’t kill him. You’re a nobody. He’ll split you open and shower in your blood.”

  I smiled at him and withdrew the knife.

  As he realized he was free from the threat, his lips curled back to reveal his pointed fangs. Only when he looked down did he see the silver blade sticking out of his chest.

  “You’ll find I’m very hard to kill,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty

  It’s really hard to get out of a wall.

  As much as my vision had adjusted so that I could see and kill Bruno, I was still a human stuck inside a pitch-black and very narrow space, and I was damn near blind.

  On the plus side, the vampire had nabbed both me and my clutch in one fell swoop, so I rummaged through the little purse and activated the flashlight feature on my phone.

  I had a number of missed calls, including one from Simone, another from Holden, and one from Shane. There was nothing from
Desmond, but he knew I was working tonight, so I hadn’t expected him to call me when I was in the middle of hunting. He was good like that.

  I shone the phone around and found I was in a slim, cobweb-filled passage that seemed to go between the men’s and women’s washrooms, judging by all the exposed pipes on either side of the walls.

  How many of these opened up so someone could grab an unsuspecting victim? Could I go back the way I came in?

  I prodded at the wall behind me, scanning for any sign of a latch or handle, something that would show me how Bruno had gotten it open in the first place. On the low part of the wall was a small button, and when I pushed it, the entire panel swung towards me silently, opening back onto the stall I’d been in minutes earlier.

  Thankfully, since I’d locked the stall door from the inside, I didn’t jump out and surprise anyone mid-pee and was able to climb out of the wall in my short skirt without giving anyone a show.

  I wasn’t sure I should shut the wall again, if only to keep anyone else from peeking around inside and hurting themselves. It was a pretty fucking suspect thing, having doors that opened into the stalls, making me think the owners of this establishment had designed it with this in mind, and this wasn’t something Davos and Bruno had devised on their own.

  After snapping a photo of the open wall and the space behind it, I texted the images to Mercedes along with the name and address of the bar. Then I kept the door locked and climbed out over the top of the stall, which was also a comical balancing act in this skirt.

  At least I knew no one else would come in here, and the bar would be shut down before sunup.

  In the meantime, I still had a nasty vampire to question.

  Davos tried and failed to hide his surprise when I sat down across the booth from him. I pulled the bloody silver knife out of my purse and set the clutch and the weapon side by side on the table.

  “I’m guessing you weren’t expecting me back so soon,” I said.